Grumble grump

Thoughts of big skies and open roads keep distracting me from the matter at hand. The matter at hand, though, seems flimsy and colourless, a bland moment in time. I berate myself constantly for doing what seems to me to be Wasting Time. Again, I have the preciousness of time thrown in my face, with the death of someone I was once close to. There is no time to waste. None, nada, zip.

It just all seems so pointless sometimes, the dreary drugdgery of work, home, filling up time with ‘stuff’. It feels like the ‘stuff’ is junk food, nutrient-less, filling a void that just keeps getting bigger. I feel guilty, though, even saying this, knowing my everyday drudgings are so much easier than most, my job mainly stimulating, my life pretty damn rosy. In comparison.

I feel like I’m waiting for something big to happen, jumping from stepping stone to stepping stone in a marshland, toward a mirage that just keeps rushing further away. Wishing I could blame it on PMS I check my calendar hopefully, knowing my hormones are blameless this time.

Perhaps I need to stop jumpingjumpingjumping and just be still for a bit. Still and quiet. Maybe with a large bottle of gin and a couple of books.

The Tallest Man on Earth

A skinny figure with his guitar silhouetted in a round moon of white light. One man, casting two shadows. On stage he looks tiny, dressed in skinny jeans (a uniform, it seems, amongst the audience), but there, on both walls, either side of the stage, he really does look like The Tallest Man on Earth.

Then he plays his guitar and sings and there is a collective intake of breath. He is astounding, his voice gravelly, but pure and beautiful. His songs move easily from ones that want to make you wiggle your bum and dance wildly, gypsey-like, preferably under a huge sky filled with stars, to ones that crumple your heart and bring huge, fat tears that drop almost audibly.

This man has plucked the best of The City Beneath The Mountain’s uber-cool and I feel at once cool and old. We bump into a young whippersnapper girl who G works with and she exclaims: "It's so cool to see old people at concerts like this and know you can be cool when you're old!" Well, quite.

It's fabulous. He's astounding. My "old" body and bones don't want it to end and my heart squelches as he plays this, a song he hasn't played before, a new one, recorded coincidentally by a boy I knew once:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PxP384b-HIs

I cried. The look of a boy, with a voice, and a guitar, is unbearably beautiful.

At the mall

It was only after G pointed them out that I realised. They were, frustratingly, sitting behind me and two tables away so I had to surreptitiously keep pretending to look at the clothes shop behind them by unobviously turning my neck 180 degrees. It's what's expected when you find yourself eating dinner in a mall, you know... the looking around thing. Isn't that the idea of trapping people in a table with food and a glass of wine, surrounded by shops. It's the cleverest form of commercialism I know of!

Back to the couple, who we initially thought were having an affair. In their mid- to late-fifties, they were both dressed smartly (obvious in the bright light of the mall), more smartly than was required of a shopper having a quick meal. She had incongruously pink finger nails, he'd carefully brushed his straggling strands of hair across his head to feign hirsutism. It wasn't working, but we gave him points for trying.

They were paying very close attention to what each was saying, laughing, looking into each other's eyes. It just seemed a wierd and very public place to be taking your mistress for dinner and it was then that G realised (she had the seat facing them) - internet date. The attention to detail, the perfect dressing, the fascinated concentration of conversation... the choice of public, well-lit place.

Finishing our pasta and wine, we walked past them on our way out, feeling suffocated by mall, and I silently wished them great love and an immediate connection because, honestly, I couldn't think of anything worse than internet dating.

The thought of having to meet some stranger in a mall, watched by curious people like me, fills me with fear and makes me come out in instant hives. Having to do it more than once sends me screaming, while sweating and getting hives, so my wish for her, with her 'I'm still fun' pink nails, is that it was her first attempted meet-up, and she will need to go on no more because he's her soulmate, straggling hair and all. They actually made a sweet couple but then I'm a hopeless romantic.

P.S. Note to self: you really, really, don't like malls. They make you feel like you can't breathe, despite endless voyeur opportunities within them.